The Johannesbau was Steiner's first purpose-built home for spiritual science, funded from 1911, conceived as temple and school at once, and realised at Dornach as the Goetheanum.
The Johannesbau in Anthroposophy is the building project Rudolf Steiner set in motion in 1911 to house spiritual science in a form of its own, the direct forerunner of the Goetheanum at Dornach. The name honours Johannes Thomasius, the seeking figure at the centre of Steiner's four Mystery Dramas, and the Johannesbau-Verein was the association of members formed to pay for it. Speaking to that association's first general assembly in Berlin on 12 December 1911, Steiner set out the intention: a temple that is also a place of learning, on the model of the ancient mystery temples. He attached one condition to it. The building had to answer to the developmental conditions of all humanity and to the judgment of future humanity, or it would not be what it should be. Munich withheld permission, the site moved to Dornach in Switzerland, and the foundation stone was laid on 20 September 1913.
The Johannesbau began as a practical question that received an unpractical answer. Steiner's movement needed a hall for the Mystery Dramas and for lecture work, and what he proposed instead was a building whose forms would be read the way a face is read. Architecture, in that December 1911 address, is not a container for spiritual science. It is one of the statements spiritual science makes.
In Steiner's Own Words
The Johannesbau, insofar as it is intended to house the seat of our spiritual science, should be something that takes into account the developmental conditions of all humanity. And it will either be this, or it will not be what it should actually be. In such a matter, one has a responsibility towards all that is known to us as spiritual laws, spiritual powers, and spiritual developmental conditions of humanity, and that can speak to our soul. Above all, we also have a responsibility to the judgment of future humanity.
What it Means Today
Steiner's condition, that a building answer to the developmental conditions of all humanity, reads as rhetoric until you meet an architect who took it literally. Imre Makovecz (1935 to 2011) is the one who did. Working in Hungary under a state with little appetite for churches or for mysticism, he read Steiner closely and built village halls, churches, and cultural centres whose roofs open like ribcages, and he became the recognised head of what is now called Hungarian organic architecture. His best-known work, the Hungarian Pavilion for Expo '92 in Seville, is a timber building shaped for the person standing inside it rather than for the photograph taken outside. In 1989 he founded the Kos Karoly Association, which ran an apprenticeship school for young architects, so the practice passed on through trained hands and not as a style anyone could copy. That is the Johannesbau brief arriving in a later century: a building that teaches, with a school around it that teaches too.
Thalira synthesis: the Johannesbau's real proposal was never a shape, it was a chain of custody, in which the forms come out of spiritual research, the research is taught to the people who build, and the finished building then teaches whoever stands inside it, which is why the Munich refusal and the Dornach fire could interrupt the work without ending it.
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